To fully leverage your hotel images and information into direct bookings, it’s essential to have your Google My Business linking travel shoppers to your hotel’s vanity website. As discussed in our previous community article on optimizing your GMB account, in addition to creating a better user experience, linking your GMB provides great SEO value for your hotel’s website.
To drive organic traffic and direct bookings, the URL field must be updated to provide travel shoppers with an accurate link back to your hotel’s individual website, especially if you are a branded hotel.
Over time, passwords can be lost. In the time between setting up your Google My Business account and creating a new vanity website, the individual who once set up the account may have left the company, or the record of your account information may have been lost in the shuffle. Instead of leaving your URL field blank or pointing to the wrong address, you can work around the current set-up by requesting Google to update your GMB page without having to log in to your account.
Check out our guide below to learn how you can request Google to update your URL in your Google My Business profile if you’ve misplaced your password!
- Login to your Gmail account (this doesn’t have to be the same account used to create your GMB profile. Any ordinary Gmail account will be sufficient).
- 2. In the search bar, type in your hotel’s name and click enter.
- 3. At the bottom of your hotel profile (or knowledge graph), on the right side of the Search Engine Results Page (where all of your hotel information exists), click “suggest an edit”.
- On the pop-up box, click “change name or other detail".
- Scroll down and enter your URL in the “website” bar, and click send.
After you have done this, Google will review the edit you have made to the hotel profile, and send you an email with the status of your update.
After you’ve made this “suggestion” to Google, you’ll notice a change in your hotel profile (knowledge graph). Visitors will now see orange text in the URL section of your hotel profile that looks something like this:
In order to make sure that your suggestion is an accurate URL, Google takes time to review your request. Once they’ve looked through the suggestion and found it to be credible, they will then look for approval from the Google My Business Owner.
After a period of time has passed without any action taken by the GMB account owner to either confirm or reject the suggested change, Google will automatically update the listing. This will now allow your hotel’s accurate URL to be listed on your Google My Business account.
This update from Google is a great way to make sure all of your property’s information is accurate and up-to-date, without having to search for long-forgotten passwords.
As we tell all of our Vizlly customers, GMB is a distinct element of a well-tailored SEO strategy. If you have any additional questions regarding Google My Business, don’t hesitate to reach out to your success coach!